Base closures

Goodbye guns, hello golf

Losing a military base may be a golden opportunity

“SOME have asked”, said Donald Rumsfeld this week, “why we are proposing any base closures during a time of war. The answer is because these changes are essential to helping us win this war.” And, of course, it makes financial sense. Closing 33 big bases and cutting back another 150 facilities should save the Pentagon close to $50 billion over the next two decades.

Correct or not, the defence secretary's reasoning is about to be attacked by state and local governments across the country. They have until early September to convince the independent Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC) that their particular bits of America's vast military empire must be preserved from Rummy's axe. In the four previous BRAC rounds, the commission has approved 85% of the Defence Department's recommendations. In all likelihood, therefore, that means tough luck for politicians such as Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, who describes the proposed closure of the Portsmouth naval shipyard, at a cost to the state of 4,510 jobs, as “nothing short of stunning, devastating and, above all, outrageous” (she has a point, since the navy secretary had just praised the shipyard for “a phenomenal record of cost, schedule, quality and safety performance”).

But, after the first shock, will BRAC decisions really be devastating? One good place to look is Irvine, in southern California's Orange County. Back in 1993, the closure of the El Toro marine corps air base was seen as a disaster. Now it is going to be turned into America's biggest park—bigger than New York's Central Park, San Francisco's Golden Gate Park and San Diego's Balboa Park combined. And it will not cost Irvine's taxpayers a penny.

In an auction in February, Florida's Lennar Communities paid $649.5m for the base. The navy will use the money for the environmental clean-up of El Toro and other bases; and Lennar will pay Irvine $200m in development fees and another $200m in property assessments. In return, Lennar gets the right to build houses and a golf course on 16% of the site.

Irvine's residents are not alone in their good fortune. Denver's Lowry air force base, a victim of the 1991 BRAC round with the loss of 2,275 jobs, is now a residential, office and park area providing 5,666 jobs; some of its 3,000 homes sell for more than $1m. The former Fitzsimmons army medical centre near Denver, a casualty of the 1995 round, is now on track to become a bioscience park providing more than 18,000 jobs within the next five years.

The problem, however, is that even though almost 85% of the 129,649 civilian jobs lost on military bases in the past four BRAC rounds have now been replaced with new ones (not counting jobs created off the bases), recovery is an uneven business. One reason is geography. If the Cannon air force base in a remote part of New Mexico closes because of the present BRAC round, it will be a lot harder for the civilian neighbours than the proposed loss of the naval surface warfare centre at Corona, which sits just east of the Los Angeles sprawl, or the naval weapons station at Concord in the Bay Area, where the land is so valuable that the locals petitioned to be put on the BRAC list.

But perhaps the biggest reason is that the various branches of the armed forces are messy tenants. They leave behind unexploded munitions, toxic waste and polluted groundwater, all of which must be cleaned up at military expense before being handed over for civilian use.

This is costly: some $11.9 billion so far, according to a study released in January by the Government Accountability Office. It is also time-consuming. At its McClellan base, one of the many Californian victims of the 1995 BRAC round, the air force in 2000 found traces of plutonium mixed in with radium-contaminated rags and brushes; the clean-up will not be finished until 2034. As Mr Rumsfeld observed this week, “Change is never easy. In fact, Abraham Lincoln once compared reorganising the army to bailing out the Potomac river with a teaspoon.”